Introduction: Conducted in rural Tasmania, this study explored the experiences of undergraduate student nurse first engagements with rural clinical practice. While the purpose of the overall study was to explore how the experience of nursing practice in a rural setting influenced the way undergraduate students shaped their professional identity, this article concentrated on the way the students came to use their time during their placement.
Methods: This study used a fusion of ethnography and hermeneutic philosophy using participant observation, field notes, interviews and reflective journaling to collect data. Data analysis took place concurrently with the data collection, which is consistent with the hermeneutic circle framework.
Results: Three major themes were developed and explored throughout the study: (1) navigating rural spaces; (2) time as a source of conflict; and (3) developing rural nurse identity. The theme described in this article concerns how the nursing students' assumptions regarding how time would be used during the rural placement were dislodged. This first involved a shift from regarding time as a background feature of daily life to seeing it as an explicit, foreground feature of everyday life. Second, it involved a shift away from conceptualising time as a cyclical unit of hours, instead focussing on the meaning the students came to attach to time in the rural practice setting.
Conclusions: The findings shed light on how undergraduate student nurses used their time during clinical practice in a rural community. With no clinical experience, on the commencement of the rural placement they initially expected to spend their time caring for people, but realised they first needed to spend their time learning about rural nursing before they could then do the work of rural nursing.